TMJ Demo 9 "Bryn" is available on 3DSPaint.com, as of last night. The actual release came about 40 minutes late because of last minute expansion to the size of the demo that pushed back final testing.

This self-imposed week-long deadline really forced me to get off my butt... Then sit right back on said butt to work at my computer every night. Some of the final product seemed a little rushed (following a full engine rewrite), but it did arrive, and I was mostly happy with the results. Some tweaks will be coming this week to collision-detection and the method by which graphics load on-the-fly from the server.

The speed is not too bad on the 3DS browser. I could drop out a few sprites to get more speed, but it seems fine with 8 sprites, 4 background screen tiles and 4 foreground screen tiles. The method of linking between levels is in place, as one can see by walking southward in the demo. This will be extended for entering and exiting buildings and caves.

Keep in mind that this demo was just a very small portion of the village Bryn. At a minimum, it will be around 9 times larger, but it could even be more than that.

The difference between the previous demos and this one is that I used a procedural seamless texture generator, called Genetica, to generate the tiles. It was an $80 well invested. The software has 1000s of preset textures that you can tweak to your needs, with various environmental maps, overlays, and vector drawings. You can then export the textures to any size your computer's RAM can hold. I tweaked the parameters of almost every texture to make the baseline tiles then edited them by hand from there.

Go ahead and leave your feedback, since I want to make TMJ the best game possible for the 3DS browser. Obviously, none of this would even exist today if not for the talented development team and supportive community. Thank you, everyone for your contributions!

To sign off this blog, let me part with a before-and-after image. This is Bryn (originally called "Roama" as it existed in the late 1990s, when I attempted to undertake the massive project of TMJ alone - without artists, without mappers, without writers...